Boston Whaler 380 Outrage: Video Boat Review

When you have a boat like the 2017 Boston Whaler 380 Outrage, with 38’0” of LOA, 11’8” of beam, triple 350 HP Mercury Verado outboards, joystick controls, and a tower with an upper helm station, it’s hard to know where to even begin talking about it. So we made the only reasonable choice, starting at one end of the boat and working our way to the other, when we jumped aboard a 380 Outrage to shoot this video boat review.

One important point we didn’t delve into too deeply during the video was Whaler’s construction technique. Sure, everyone’s heard it’s unsinkable. But it’s more than that. The Unibond process also gives Whaler’s boats an incredibly solid feeling underfoot, in no small part because there aren’t any voids between the hull’s inner and outer liners.

Whaler starts off by molding both an inner and an outer hull. The inner hull gets raised with a crane, rotated 180 degrees, and placed inside the outer liner. Then the two pieces are bolted or clamped together, and liquid closed-cell foam gets “shot” between them. As the liquid polyurethane undergoes a chemical reaction to solidify it heats to over 400 degrees and rapidly expands, completely filling every nook and cranny between the two pieces. In fact, it expands under so much pressure that Whaler has to first drill ports near the top of the boat so the excess foam can escape. When all is said and done the voids are filled, the two hulls are bonded together with the foam, and they’ve created a glass-foam-glass sandwich that is essentially a single piece.

Why doesn’t everyone build boats in this manner? As one might imagine, it’s rather expensive. And that’s why Boston Whalers commonly carry a price-tag that’s on the high side of the market. The 380 Outrage, for example, is likely to crack the half-million mark by the time you get it rigged the way you like it. Go crazy with big-ticket options like a Seakeeper gyro-stabilization system, helm-deck air conditioning, freezer plates for the fishboxes, an electric-retracting Sunshade, the full tower with upper station, and on and on, and you could surpass the $600,000 mark.

It should be noted at this point that the 380 Outrage does come with a number of expensive standard features that wouldn’t normally be included in the base cost by most builders. A bow thruster, for example. A Fusion UD 750 stereo system with eight speakers, two amplifiers, and two remote controls. Even cabin air conditioning is included on the standard features list.

The 380 Outrage has an aggressive deep-V hull design, which chews through the waves.

Another aspect of this boat that we didn’t go into in great detail in the video is its seakeeping ability. If you watch closely from 2:24 to 2:45 in the video, you can see that there were some significant waves in the ocean when we tested this boat. (And trust us, the waves never look as big in pictures or on film as they are in real life). But even at high speeds, we didn’t get tossed around or slammed. Part of the reason lies in the construction method we discussed earlier, and part of the credit goes to Whaler’s deep-V, multiple strake, 23-degree transom deadrise hull design.

The bottom line? Like we said in the video: if you’re in the market for a center console of this size, you need to do some serious research on the 380 Outrage before you make any decisions. And you need to set aside a day for a sea trial—an entire day, because it’ll take you at least that long to get to know this big, beefy, bodacious offshore beastie.